Reserved Seating Areas

Heritage Experience

Not currently available. Join us for a food and wine pairing featuring our Heritage and Reserve wines, our extremely small-production, limited releases that you can’t taste anywhere else on the property.

Event Info

the bacchus club has its privileges.

Over 100 years ago Charles Bundschu established the Bacchus Club to gather family and friends to celebrate Rhinefarm, poetry and song―a tradition that continues today. Reflected in all Bacchus Club experiences are our family’s interests in discovery, history, culture, music and the arts, good food, laughter and, of course, great wine. And perhaps most importantly, we bottle the spirit of Rhinefarm and ship hand-crafted Gundlach Bundschu wine directly to your door.

Vintage Reserve

Heritage Selection

Sometimes there is a block, a single row of vines, or even just a few barrels that produce wines of distinctive and exceptional personality and heritage. We’ve crafted three limited bottlings that showcase the very best of our estate vineyard.

bundschu family cabernet

Our Story

For six generations and over 160 years, our family has farmed our Rhinefarm estate vineyard at the crossroads of the Sonoma Valley, Carneros and Napa Valley appellations. Today, we focus on making small lots of ultra-premium wines from this distinctive and historic property.

Wine Tools

Helpful Information

Vintage Reserve

Sonoma Valley

Since 1981, the Bundschu Family has crafted a limited Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve bottling from the most elegant and expressive barrels of the vintage with the designation Vintage Reserve. To keep things interesting, we change the label every vintage, highlighting inspired artists. This current label series was crafted by Nate Reifke.

From Vine to Wine

Most of the grapes that make up our Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve wine come from the sections of Rhinefarm at its very highest elevations (150-400 feet) and are grown in a rocky, volcanic soil known as Rhyolite. Standing at 400 feet, as Rhinefarm stretches in the distance, you can see the light, volcanic rock (called tufa) that broke down over millions of years to form the soil.

When we began to plan the Vintage Reserve program more than 30 years ago, we first identified the very best blocks in our estate vineyard and paid extra special attention to those vines. We still care for them painstakingly today. No expense is spared in in the farming of these blocks — just the very best berries from the best clusters from the best vines from the best rows from the best blocks are picked and pressed.

Only the highest quality grapes ever have a chance at making it into a Vintage Reserve barrel. The grapes are meticulously sorted using state of the art equipment — you can feel the excitement on the days of harvest when the optical sorter is on the crushpad. There’s no doubt — something special is happening. With the aid of the sorter, our winemaking team selects only the finest grapes, those of the desired shape, color and size, to be pressed and fermented as potential Vintage Reserve.

It doesn’t stop when the wine goes into barrel. From these barrels, winemaker Keith Emerson selects the best ones to create a blend worthy of the Vintage Reserve label.

The Cool Labels

Since day one, the labels themselves have been just as special as what’s inside the bottle. Artists are commissioned to create unique art for each vintage, in series ranging from odes to ancient winemaking world to homages to our family’s more recent history to images inspired by the very modern.

Our Vintage Reserve program bottles vineyard artistry. We strive to create labels that are as unique as what’s inside the bottle. From the beginning, artists have been commissioned to create unique art for each vintage. The series ranges from odes to ancient winemaking world to homages to our family’s recent history to images inspired by nature.

With the 2011 vintage, we launched a new series of labels, all the work of a single artist: Nate Reifke, who has a long history of working with the Bundschu family. For the Groundworks series, Nate camped here and hiked our 320-acre property, finding his inspiration in — and, in fact, used in his materials — the very same elements that feed, nourish and shape our grapes and wine. He photographed his own ephemeral works before time, weather and the elements washed them away, and the results adorn the latest Vintage Reserve series.

Label History

Each Vintage Reserve label since the first in 1981 has been the work of an artist. Before Nate Reifke’s most recent series, we offered a culmination of the American Landscape from 2005 – 2010, featuring artists from New Orleans, Chicago, Maine, Santa Fe and the Pacific Northwest. The 2010 label, the final in that series, brought it all back home to Rhinefarm with a depiction of the pair of watusi cattle raised by Jim and Nancy Bundschu right here, alongside top Cabernet Sauvignon vines. Traveling the country to commemorate our winery’s 150th anniversary inspired us to create this series of Vintage Reserve labels celebrating America’s diverse communities and our common passion.